The new project
of the Tea Party Movement is to revise American history and sanitize it to the
extent that it is a vapid, happy-ever-after, scrubbed and polished neo-modern
version of the historical record. From Texas to Tennessee, Tea Baggers are
petitioning the legislature to legally make changes to text books used in
education to write their version of historical events, especially slavery and
the history of other minority peoples.

Stupidity and
lunacy oftentimes go together and the Tea Baggers have demonstrated an unusual
aptitude for both but their new program of revisionism exposes an inability to
grasp a fundamental concept that even a toddler can understand. And just
because you will something away that's not to your liking does not mean that it's
non-existent. That's just plain stupid reasoning.

The latest thing
for the Tea Partiers is to push for a law(s) that would revise history to erase
or tone down historical references to the Founding Fathers owning of Black
slaves. These laws, if the Tea Baggers have their say, would rewrite the governing
of the selection of textbooks.

Now I don't know
about you but changing a law to enact revisions and changes to textbooks to
make slavery and the Founding Fathers, well, more saintly is stupid because
everyone knows that there is enough irrefutable evidence to support the fact
that many were slave owners. In fact, there was a particularly odious clause in
the constitution that in 1789, African-Americans were defined in the
Constitution as "3/5 of a person" for counting representation, and could not
vote at all.

That
of course has long been a very uncomfortable fact even though that clause was
struck from the US Constitution in 1865 following the Civil War. For 90 years
thereafter, states did all sorts of things to abridge the right to vote for
African-Americans. The main means were seemingly "objective" criteria
like "literacy laws," which required that a person be able to read
before they could register to vote. Since most African-Americans at the time
were illiterate, that effectively prevented their voting. There were many cases
before the Supreme Court, mostly in southern states, in which means of blocking
the vote were removed.

The
real change came during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, when the last
of the racial restrictions were finally removed. Prior to the 1960s, the
Supreme Court had determined that schools could be "separate but
equal," which meant there were separate schools for African-Americans.
During the 1960s, the Supreme Court enforced the desegregation of the schools
on the grounds that "separate is inherently unequal."

Legally
speaking, the right to vote came with the 15th amendment. But socially
speaking, it took the Civil Rights movement to make it a reality. Now the whack
jobs in the Tea Party Movement in Tennessee are seeking to strike these kinds
of unsettling facts from History books and other educational material on the
grounds that " Neglect
and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character
of the United States. We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee
the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government."

Textbooks would be
vetted by this standard: "No portrayal of minority experience in the
history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions
of the Founding Fathers...." The Tea Party in Tennessee is seeking in its
own words to address "an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance,
the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in
one way or another."

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So according to the
Tea Baggers this history, in their view, is made up and they want to set the
historical record straight. But facts are pesky and persistent things and no
amount of lunacy and delusions will debunk that or make them go away. Just as the sexual activities between
slave women and their masters are facts so too does the human nature of the
Founding Fathers that were part and parcel of the slave owning system in the
United States.

To separate the
Founding Fathers from the institution of slavery in the United States is like
trying to make sugar salt -" it is impossible. So trying to rewrite history to
place them above and divorced from the very economic system of the United
States at that time is clearly delusional thinking. And just as important is
the courageous and important struggles of the anti-slavery movement in the
United States since both activities have given the United States, for better or
worse, its essential character.

So the dilemma for
the Tea Party Movement is how to deal with the other people in the
institutionalized system of slavery on both sides of the debate. How will they
handle people like Harriet Tubman or Nat Turner? How will they place Governor
Wallace the epitome of the pro-segregationist movement? Pretending that they do
not exist in the context of America's slave system history is just plain dumb.

It is the latest in
a long series of events that are aimed at "taking back our country" -" one of
the mantras of the Tea Party Movement. I don't know who has taken away "their
country" that they would move to get it back. Maybe America is just a choice
piece to real estate to these people. I just don't know.

But in the end it
is true that history is a persistent son of a gun and both written and oral
traditions make sure that facts endure and no matter the lunacy of a group of
people that want to sanitize the America's slave past it will endure for
generations to come.

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MICHAEL D. ROBERTS is a top Political Strategist and Business, Management and Communications Specialist in New York City's Black community. He is an experienced writer whose specialty is socio-political and economic analysis and local (more...)